For any organization, attrition and turnover are huge risks. In addition to the costs of hiring and training new employees, there’s also the cost of losing the institutional and functional knowledge that walks out the door when an employee leaves. Capturing, managing and retaining that kind of knowledge is a challenge that knowledge management solutions aim to overcome.
Think of knowledge management as a way to retain the knowledge that your employees are creating as well as the tacit, institutional knowledge that employees gain over time.
The first step in that effort is organizing and retaining knowledge in the form of work products. For the last 20 to 30 years, file shares offered a simple, easy way to collect documents and files as they’re created. But keeping that information is only part of the challenge in knowledge management. You also need to be able to find it again to improve and reuse it, so that your employees aren’t reinventing the wheel every time they have to create a work product.
For the last 12 years or so, SharePoint has served as a great tool for content management. Since it serves as a collaboration platform and document repository, it provides a central location for the work products your employees are creating. Over time, SharePoint has added features that take it far beyond a file share’s knowledge management capabilities.
SharePoint makes it easy to manage versions, allowing users to check in and check out of files and projects. More recently, SharePoint has enabled co-authoring, with the technology reconciling changes made by two individuals who are collaborating on a single work product at the same time.
But the real challenge in knowledge management is how to look beyond the work products themselves to capture the tacit knowledge around those documents as well as the institutional knowledge that accrues as organizations learn, grow and improve.
For example, let’s say your organization decides to devote a lot of time and effort to compile your best practices for completing work, and to document them in the form of standard operating procedures and work process plans. After a couple of months, however, people will likely have found a better or more efficient way work. While that’s a great problem to have, it means that continuing to document evolving knowledge is almost an impossible feat.
As a result, your organization is constantly at risk of having valuable knowledge walk out the door before you’ve had a chance to capture it and reinvest that know-how in your employees.
For the past 15 to 20 years, organizations have tried to capture this tacit and institutional knowledge by using discussion threads as well as web parts and portlets. But these conversations don’t get tied back to the work product. And people don’t tend to converse in threaded discussions unless they’re talking about something specific and have the ability to reach back to the work product they’re discussing.
One solution to this problem comes from using SharePoint Online within the Office 365 framework. This platform provides companies access to the technology to gather tacit knowledge and make it easy to find and reuse, with comparatively little effort. The technology takes threaded discussions and newsfeeds — often called “enterprise social computing” — and associates them with the work products, adding a layer of contextually relevant tacit knowledge collection.
When you use SharePoint Online in this way, you’re capturing and managing those work products and files more effectively, relying on technology to be the gatekeeper for consistency and quality, as well as using the technology to overlay the conversations that give context to those work products.
You’re always going to have the challenge of knowledge walking out the door due to attrition and turnover. But knowledge management technology allows you to capture more of your employees’ activity while creating work products. And because it’s so simple to use, you’re able to informally update and improve your best practices and policies and tacit knowledge without a lot of formal effort.
Learn more about implementing knowledge management solutions by contacting Portal Solutions.
